Why we need to stop glorifying “busy”.

You can’t deny that when you finish a day in which you feel like you’ve made the most of every minute, you get a great sense of satisfaction.

And, why wouldn’t you?

With the amount of distractions we encounter on a day-to-day basis, to end the day in the knowledge that our focus has been sustained enough to smash our to-do list can feel like quite an accomplishment. Strong productivity will always play an integral role in helping you to take bigger strides towards your target destination.

Nevertheless, becoming too insistent in acquiring these daily “wins” can result in a loss of perspective. If you’re not careful, becoming addicted to being “busy”, so to speak, can lead you to neglecting and overlooking the most important aspects of life, like building meaningful relationships and finding ways to give back to the wider community.

It’s essential that, in order to live with integrity and be truly fulfilled, you critique the destination before you begin the journey. Is the end goal aligned with your core values? Will the journey facilitate your ideal lifestyle, or, at least, take you to a circumstance that will place you within reach of your innermost desires?

If the answer is no to all of these, then your busyness is not productivity, and your completed to-do list has done little to support you in making any real progress. Are you in a job that you feel has very little impact? That isn’t helping you to grow? This might be okay temporarily, if you recognise it as a means to an end. But if that job, say, doesn’t even pay enough to put you in an economic position that’ll serve as a launch-pad for your future endeavours, it’s probably a waste of your time.

You need to value the process as well as the end result.

Perhaps you’re investing your time in working on a business that you believe will have optimal financial prospects? While this is not a terrible idea, ask yourself: Besides monetary gain, will this project, in it’s process, help me to get what I want out of life? It sounds bleak, but with business success-rate statistics revealing that 20% of businesses fail in their first year, 30% after two, and 70% after 10, you’ve got to want to be in it for the long-haul, regardless of whether or not you end up ballin’.

To put it simply, a passion project is very rarely a mistake.

When the thing you’re investing yourself in is meaningful to you on a deeper level, the end result is of little importance, because you care greatly about what you’re doing in the present. If, as with most businesses, it’s a side-hustle in its early days, it’s a worthwhile investment of your time and energy because it could count as being a past-time. If you’re getting pleasure and fulfilment from the doing, then you’re never going to see it as a waste of time.

Rather than perceiving it as a risk, a loss of resources, you’ll simply deem it as a necessary distraction from the mundane day-to-day tasks. It’s the equivalent of, say, someone buying art materials or paying for dance classes, to bring more joy into their life.

Make it a rule for yourself to make your work a labour of love, at every possible opportunity, and you’ll have very few regrets. “Busy” will finally be serving to fulfil a greater, more meaningful, purpose to your life. And realise deeply that, to be still, to not be preoccupied, does not necessarily equate to laziness or to being idle.

We need stillness to gain greater perspective, greater awareness about ourselves, our values, and what we want in life.

Are you guilty of placing “busy” on a pedestal, irregardless of the content of that busyness? If you are, or have been in the past, then share your experience below, and what you’re doing, or have done, to remove the habit from your life.